The Lead

Lex the police dog from central Illinois is far from top dog in drug-sniffing skills. That's the core finding of a potentially influential new ruling from the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which considered the question of how much police should rely on their K-9 partners to justify searches when a dog's own competence, as in Lex's case, is itself suspect.

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The small arthropods clinging to a piece of aircraft debris that washed ashore on an Indian Ocean island may provide valuable evidence in the disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines plane, one of the greatest aviation mysteries in history.

The FBI is struggling to attract computer scientists to its cybersecurity program mainly due to low pay, a report by the U.S. Department of Justice showed, highlighting weaknesses in a flagship initiative to tackle growing cyber threats.

A recently disclosed vulnerability in Bind, the most widely used software for translating human-friendly domain names into IP addresses used by servers, makes it possible for lone-wolf attackers to bring down huge swaths of the Internet, a security researcher has warned.

Capt. James McColl and Capt. Justin Lanahan are cyber officers, part of the newly created 17-series Army branch. Both participated in a week-long "hackathon" in Arlington, Virginia, July 20-24, in support of continued development of "Plan X," a four-year, $120-million program at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.

A recently discovered Russian cyber espionage operation camouflages its nefarious activity by employing a combination of legitimate services such as Twitter, Github, and cloud storage - often pilfering information during a victim organization's work day.

The prices for stolen payment card data and other cybercrime products and services on Russian underground forums continue to fall. But such marketplaces are thriving more than ever, in part, because they help attackers quickly and affordably organize their efforts.

United Airlines has been breached, and investigators believe the perpetrators to be the same group that hacked US health insurer Anthem and stole personal and employment information of 78.8 million customers and non-customers.

About two weeks into last year's conflict in Gaza, Palestinian photographer Jehad Saftawi began to tire of venturing into the city every day to take images of the wreckage. He decided instead to set up a video camera showing the Gaza skyline in his apartment. A year on, Amnesty International says evidence collected by Saftawi and others shows that Israeli forces carried out war crimes in retaliation for the capture of an Israeli soldier.

The military on Monday exhumed more caskets containing the unidentified remains of USS Oklahoma crew members killed in the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor. A lab in Hawaii will identify some remains using dental records. The remains will then be sent to another lab in Omaha for DNA analysis.

In its three years in operation, the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation’s Cold Case Unit brought to close two unsolved homicide cases dating as far back as the 1970s. The unit was shut down in 2011 after the federal grant that funded it ran out. But DCI officials said they continue to investigate homicides cases that have gone years, or even decades, without justice.

The former administrator of Darkode, the online cybercrime forum that was recently shut down by law enforcement agencies, is preparing to bring it back, with better security and privacy for its members.

One of the most dangerous vulnerabilities to hit the Android scene ever has been uncovered: Dubbed Stagefright, the flaw makes all Android devices targets of remote take-over by simply receiving an MMS message, without even having to open or view it.

An attack in early 2014 on Anthem, the No. 2 US health insurer, was by most measuring sticks a historic hack, leading to the biggest healthcare data breach ever. New evidence unearthed by researchers from security firm Symantec, however, shows it was business as usual for the hacking group, which over the past three years has carried out more than a dozen similar attacks.